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Fresh off the graduation podium at Johns Hopkins University, where I studied creative writing and art history, I found myself at an immediate loss. What next? I had worked hard, both throughout the academic years and during my vacations, and my parents urged me to take a breather before entering the work world. End your college days with an extended trip, they said. The idea of traveling alone through Europe, testing my mettle much as the writer Henry James tested his in the 19th century, discovering great artworks in cities like Paris and Berlin, where I had never been, and learning whether I had it in me to become a writer -- it all sounded so exciting. And so that is how I came to have one month -- and $10,000 -- to tour eight European cities, with rather unusual instructions: Relive, in the 21st century, the kind of grand tour that was popular in the 19th century.

Two centuries ago, the grand tour was an extended, high-culture journey undertaken with or without chaperones (sometimes called "bear leaders") by fashionable young and wealthy Europeans and Americans. It was really a means for young and privileged members of society to see the great masterpieces of Western art and architecture that, until that point, had been only plates in books. It was the thing to do. Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson went on a grand tour, but so did the tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt, when he accompanied 10 of his 13 children through Europe. Fanny Knight, 16, traveled with her mother and Mississippi cotton-merchant father, while fictional Sebastian Flyte, the teddy-bear toting aristocrat in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, traipsed (drunkenly) through Europe before dropping out of Oxford.

For the 20-something on the grand tour, this long and sometimes arduous trip through Europe -- perhaps crossing the Swiss Alps in horse and carriage, or coming face-to-face with malaria in Rome -- was really about finding one's way through strange and foreign lands, about testing one's ability to stand on one's own two feet, an important coming-of-age rite before formally entering the work world and the uncosseted life of adulthood. It was on his grand tour that Henry James painfully learned -- in between dining with John Ruskin and scouring Italian churches for works by Bellini -- how to manage his debilitating and chronic constipation.

The Grand Canal in Venice, Italy. The author discovered everything from the Venice Biennale to the dungeons that once held Casanova.
Photographs: Katherine Morais/Barron's Graphics

The grand tour was well established by the mid-19th century, and the most privileged Americans generally traveled with letters of introduction, were welcomed into local literary and social circles, and often met prominent figures such as Dickens, Wordsworth, and sometimes even Queen Victoria.

Paris dazzled them. Boston's Thomas Gold Appleton, an American artist, said that "good Americans, when they die, go to Paris," while others wrote home that Versailles' opulence and extravagant fountains were "a disgusting and outrageous perversion." Many were deeply shocked by the Parisians' appetite for masked balls and gambling, not to mention the wide disregard for the Sabbath. A young American with his chaperone, a minister, wrote they were finally returning home "with our hearts more warmly attached to our beloved country than when we left her shores."

But the grand tour was also an important and practical means to teach wealthy scions how to responsibly manage money. After fending off the usual parental harangues about profligacy, Henry James returned home after 11 months in Europe having spent just 379 pounds of the £1,000 his father gave him for the trip. As his grand tour ended, James wrote home, making clear that he had been neither extravagant nor parsimonious but prudent, primly stating, "I have lived at the best hotels and done trips in the most comfortable way."

My parental units were clearly hoping something similarly miraculous would happen when I was abroad. And so I set about proving to them I could stay on a tight budget during my month-long trip, while negotiating screaming German border police, a tussle with snakes under the streets of London, a dubious invitation to breakfast at a hashish-filled Amsterdam coffee shop, and the simple loneliness that wells up in a person when they arrive late at night in a strange city's cold central station.

BUT FIRST, THE LOGISTICS. To husband my $10,000, I started off by prepaying most of my big purchases. My $1,081 flight was found by surfing Expedia.com; my Eurail Global Pass, for $595, was purchased on Eurail.com. Accommodations, many found on the likes of Hotels.com, were a mix of prebooked three-star hotels and smaller bed-and-breakfasts, and cost between $81 and $149 a night. I downloaded Ulmon city maps onto my iPad, which allowed me to search locations without Internet connection, and language apps, such as Bravolol and Duolingo. Ready, but concerned. Even before making it to JFK airport, I had spent 42% of my budget.

A view of Paris while walking up to Sacré-Coeur Basilica, top left, and The Lacemaker by Vermeer hanging at the Louvre, top right. The remains of the Berlin Wall, bottom left, turned into an artwork by Kani Alavi, and the Brandenburg Gate through which so much of German history has marched. Berlin offered far better value food, lodging, and drink than Paris.
Photographs: Katherine Morais/Barron's Graphics

LONDON. Groggy from my late-September overnight flight, I took the Piccadilly Line, crammed with morning commuters, to Earls Court. It was a chilly, gray day, and my leggings and thin sweatshirt left me shivering, self-conscious about my lack of street style. The Mayflower Hotel was drab, but conveniently located near the West End.

I immediately visited the British Library and tiredly followed uniformed school children traipsing through an exhibition on international propaganda from the 20th and 21st centuries, and the permanent collection containing the Magna Carta and the third volume of Jane Austen's notebook. That night, it was off across the River Thames to Battersea and a jam session at Le QuecumBar, a French brasserie and jazz bar dedicated to Gypsy swing and the memory of Django Reinhardt. As I sat alone with a glass of wine at a tiny marble table, my foot tapping to the music, a French man and German woman invited me to join them. The rest of the night was spent discussing Baudelaire and the satirical left-wing French paper le Canard Enchaîné.

London is about the theater, of course, and I went to see Chimerica in the West End, an acclaimed new play exploring the relationship of a rising China and a declining U.S. The plot focused on a fictional American photojournalist whose career highlight was a seminal photo he took of the Tiananmen Square protests. The multilayered and nuanced plot left me stunned and thinking hard about the U.S.'s international news and photo images, reinforcing its superpower image, and I wondered if I could have seen this thought-provoking play back in the U.S. -- it seemed too "close" and painful a subject to bear.

The days when only tough mutton and canned beans could be had are gone. The traditional London pubs served savory pies and succulent roast poultry, "farm to table" fare. A wrapped halloumi, a grilled Greek cheese that I purchased from a street vender in Brick Lane, was delicious until the sandwich exploded, dribbling hot sauce down my leg. I had stewed black lentils at the Cinnamon Club, a fashionable Indian restaurant located in the Old Westminster Library, before making a pilgrimage to Ottolenghi up in Islington. I had Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi's cookbook Jerusalem back at home, and I dined on their seared tuna and a grilled peach salad. But Ottolenghi disappointed somewhat; my favorite remained Polpo in Covent Garden, serving a delicious vegetarian dish of chickpea, spinach, and ricotta "meatballs."

The Foundling Museum on Brunswick Square, an orphanage founded in 1739 by Captain Thomas Coram to care for London's street urchins, was a terrific find. Foundlings were the byproduct of the brutal 18th-century urban poverty, the kind of London inhabited by harlots and gin-addled drunks found in the works of artist William Hogarth. Hogarth was in fact a founding governor and patron of the arts at the Foundling Hospital, and his efforts -- as well as the hospital benefit concerts conducted by George Frideric Handel -- oddly made it a center of the arts in the 18th century. The museum today still contains paintings by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, and Allan Ramsay. "Moses Brought Before Pharaoh's Daughter", by Hogarth, depicts the biblical child being both orphaned by his real mother and adopted by the Egyptian princess. I loved this powerful painting, the expression of horror on Moses' plump baby face as he recoils from his new mother.

Il Duomo in Florence, top left. The Ferris wheel in the Prater park in Vienna, top right.
Photographs: Katherine Morais/Barron's Graphics

This Hogarthian mix of high art and low life is still at the heart of London, something I discovered at the Last Tuesday Society's masquerade ball, held underground in the Georgian-era tunnels lurking below the Strand. Masks are mandatory, and the tickets cost £25 ($40). I was wearing a dark silver, strapless dress with a Venetian pink mask as my friend and I descended the Adams Street spiral staircase to the windowless brick, vaulted quarters with white walls and wooden floors that prevented the rooms from appearing too dank.

Pop, jazz, and classical music emerged from separate dance chambers. There was a chocolate fountain with dipping fruit, and torture equipment complete with a mock torturer. For a semi-organized Georgian waltz, we were instructed to embody the spirit of a sea otter as we twirled the floor. One or two people in the crowd were entirely naked but for their masks. A woman, dressed in a floor-length tie-dye gown, waltzed with a Darth Vader mask; a man in fez, clutching a cane, looked like an Edwardian aristocrat just returned from the Near East. Over in the petting zoo of snails, tarantulas, and scorpions, a yellow snake was draped around my neck like a scarf.

The can-can was a scandalous 19th-century Parisian dance that deeply shocked and titillated young Americans. Now I, too, had my 21st-century whiff of European decadence. It was time to leave.

AMSTERDAM. Amsterdam's Centraal station late at night awakened me to the reality of traveling solo. Trying to read the Dutch street signs and orient myself, I headed toward the red-light district, the opposite direction from where I needed to go. I finally asked for help. Locals kindly insisted on calling me a taxi, then gave the driver strict instructions not to rip off this tourist.

Next morning, I purchased a Museumkaart pass for 55 euros ($75), and for days afterward, I visited the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, Van Gogh Museum, Photography Museum, Jewish Historical Museum, and Our Lord in the Attic Museum. Johannes Vermeer's "The Love Letter" and "View of Houses in Delft" -- small canvasses in the Rijksmuseum that did not disappoint despite the pressing mob -- provided me with a window onto 17th-century Amsterdam, and from then on, as I made my way through the city, I periodically felt like I had stepped into a Vermeer.

The city's town houses form a kind of wall around the Canal Ring, a collage of rich brown buildings, three windows wide and sometimes six stories high, their rooftops looking like barristers' wigs. All Inn the Family, my quaint bed-and-breakfast centrally located in the Jordaan, was one of these atmospheric buildings, with its wooden spiral staircase and my room's wide window that opened onto the brick street just off the Canal Ring. The spotless city center, the odorless canals, the locals whizzing by on bicycles, babies attached to their front or back -- it was all so pleasant.

Kate's room, above, was in the B&B Monte Oliveto in Florence, her favorite inn. It cost about $100 a night.
Photographs: Katherine Morais/Barron's Graphics

Haesje Claes was a traditional Dutch restaurant in an old-world, wood-paneled dining hall mostly overrun by foreign tourists. I much preferred Kantjil & de Tijger, an unpretentious Indonesian restaurant where I enjoyed a hearty chicken curry and spicy mushrooms steamed in a banana leaf. The meal, which came to €24, was both comforting and exotic. No curious young adult's visit to Amsterdam is complete without an after-dinner stroll through the red-light district; it seemed more touristy than sleazy.

Two of my favorite museums in Amsterdam also turned out to be restored Dutch houses. The rarely visited Museum Ons' Lieve Heer op Solder (Our Lord in the Attic) is a 17th-century Catholic church that, during the Protestant Reformation, secretly occupied attic rooms above three houses. It was here the city's Catholics conducted their clandestine masses, and these Catholics suffering from religious intolerance instantly brought back my visit to the Anne Frank Museum and those attic rooms -- where the Frank family, similarly, had hidden from the Nazis.

PARIS. The Art Hôtel Congrès, stylish and well priced at $146 per night when prepaid on Expedia, was located in the 17th district of Paris, fairly close to the Moulin Rouge and Sacré-Coeur. Breakfast was taken at cafes along my five-minute morning walk to the metro, in bistros full of elderly Parisian men starting off the morning with friendly conversations and Eau de Vie, the local firewater. Before asking for the bill, I plugged my headphones into my iPad and listened to the French language app say, "L'addition s'il vous plaît."

In a flurry of activity, I visited Sainte-Chapelle, Musée de l'Orangerie, Musée de Cluny, and the Musée d'Orsay, where I enjoyed a quiche Lorraine in the clock-tower restaurant. I saw pigs' feet and chickens with their heads still attached at the Bastille open market, and attended a classical concert in the attic of Musée Cognacq-Jay.

But most of all, I just couldn't get enough of the crowded, overwhelming, and exhausting Louvre. Luckily, Paris's two-day museum pass, purchased for €40.50 from the tourist center at Gare du Nord, let me skip the long lines, and I spotted five overlooked Leonardo da Vinci works besides the famous "Mona Lisa", drawing the huge crowds. One of my favorite Louvre pieces was "David with the Head of Goliath", by Guido Reni, 1605. This David leans nonchalantly against the pillar, staring at the monstrous head of Goliath. Many a Renaissance master tackled the subject, but Reni's David wears a fantastic expression of adolescent impudence; there's something arrogant about his slouching body and the look coldly lacking any emotion, despite having just slain Goliath.

In the less-visited Richelieu wing, the Napoleon III apartments were lavishly decorated in the Rococo style of the 18th century, while the Northern European rooms housed Vermeer's "The Lacemaker" and "The Astronomer", both glorious depictions of people hard at work. One artistic revelation after another came at me as I prowled the museum, and after climbing Notre Dame in the afternoon, I found my legs wouldn't stop trembling -- and rather violently when desperation forced me to squat over a public toilet.

The following night, I visited a college friend's mother at her apartment in the Marais, and she took me to a French bistro overlooking the Seine where I had snails for the first time, scooping the snail's body from its hard shell with a tiny fork. It was not nauseatingly slimy, as I had imagined, but a pod of buttery, garlicky delight. Another hit was the Verjus Bar à Vin, a wine bar and restaurant with limited seating where my university sorority sister and I shared a delicious meal of marinated feta salad, burrata mozzarella, pan-roasted mussels with chorizo, grass-fed beef meatballs in tomato sauce, and wine, of course -- all for €34 per person. This bar-restaurant was found on parisbymouth.com, a reliable food guide to eating well in the city.

But at the Corte Vechia B&B in Venice, down a residential street, a delicious breakfast arrived daily at her door. It cost about $100 a night.
Photographs: Katherine Morais/Barron's Graphics

BERLIN. For the 13-hour overnight train trip from Paris to Berlin we were packed like sardines in a mixed-gender couchette of six beds. An American businessman, horrified by what he had booked, walked the halls muttering, "Am I supposed to just lie here for 13 hours?" The trip was not improved when a German policeman stormed our room at 1 a.m., challenging a Bangladeshi who had smoked in the toilet. The policeman screamed at him; I stared transfixed at his gun, and the Bangladeshi begged us to pay his fine. When the policeman discovered he didn't have proper documentation, the Bangladeshi was escorted from the train.

The Hotel Transit Loft in Prenzlauer Berg was a kind of up-market hostel in a converted factory, and I had a giant, spotless room for €81 a night. I felt very alone in the unfamiliar, industrial city of Berlin. The ancient art collections of the museums on Museum Island are of the highest order, but their treasures have little to do with German history and more to do with the raiding skills of 19th-century German archeologists like Heinrich Schliemann. Still, I stood awed before the Neues Museum's bust of Queen Nefertiti, from the Amarna period, rich and stunning in its indigo blue and gold.

Berlin still seems to be in the process of reconstruction; never before have I seen so many cranes. Various plaques around the mitte, or city center, gave a history lesson on buildings destroyed during the war; other notices told how the city was divided by the Soviets and the West after the war. The largest portion of the remaining Berlin Wall runs for over a kilometer along the Spree River. There, 118 artists used the original concrete to create an outdoor gallery and monument to the fallen wall, turning it into a symbol of international peace. Walking the gallery wall was quite moving. The piece that struck me most was by Kani Alavi, an artist originally from Iran, depicting faces both trapped by the wall and breaking through it. Alavi painted the faces he saw in Berlin when the wall actually fell, and they are not expressions of joy, but rather of fear and anxiety.

I crossed the Spree to have dinner in Kreuzberg, a hip neighborhood with a large Turkish population. At Eckbert Zwo, a tavern-restaurant located on the corner of Görlitzer Park, the German owners were in mid-argument as a big dog wandered in and out. I was first directed to a large wooden table by the window -- "so you can make many friends" -- but then was asked to move to a smaller table when a much larger group arrived. I pointed blindly at the menu; the cordial waiter brought me a cheesy homemade Spätzle, or German egg noodles cooked with wood mushrooms and onions, and a salad. Nothing fancy, but delicious. Two glasses of the best Riesling I ever had–far better than the acidic and watery wines I had in Paris -- cost less than €6. The final bill came to €15.

Crossing over the bridge on the way to the S tram, eating an oozing baklava purchased from a Turkish bakery, I came across some young musicians performing techno jazz, with a saxophone hooked into a computer. The crowd was a mixture of workers commuting by tram and a young, milling group in heavy overcoats, drinking beer. They effectively turned the bridge into an outdoor bar, and I finally understood why the city was so popular with my age group. It was the European equivalent of Brooklyn's Williamsburg before it was discovered by Yuppies, undoubtedly the Continent's best value for the money, quality of food and lodging, and authentic culture.

VIENNA. I arrived in Vienna weary from a second overnight train, though this time, I booked a single-sex berth with only three beds. In Vienna for just one night, I still found time for a glass of Sturm, a young wine made with semifermented grapes; attend the opera Salome at the Volksoper, for €92; and ride the iconic Ferris wheel that was in The Third Man, with Orson Welles. For a small city, Vienna has a huge number of museums, and one of its jewels is the Venus of Willendorf, a 25,000-year-old sculpture the size of a fist and the earliest representation of a human body still in existence. The Venus of Willendorf is swollen with womanhood, her bulbous, fertile body representing the "exaggerated beauty" of prehistoric women. It was rather unexpected to find myself suddenly bonding with prehistoric mankind.

VENICE. Venice always appeared to me as a museum rather than a living city, but my bed-and-breakfast, Corte Vecchia, down a residential street near the Accademia, shattered this assumption. My single room, for €72 a night, was in the home of a young Venetian family, across the street from a local liceo, or school. Each morning, a breakfast tray of pastries, fruit, and yogurt arrived at my door.

Venice's streets and alleys were packed with tourists taking photos and discussing where they should eat, ankle deep in the foul-smelling water of St. Mark's Square. But to me, as I meandered through the city, it still looked like Canaletto's paintings. The sinking multicolored buildings, crumbling and weary, are even more beautiful in their old age. A trip over even the smallest of bridges allowed me to peer into the murky and stinky canal water, my own reflection rippling in the colorful backdrop.

The Byzantine Saint Mark's Basilica and the adjacent Palazzo Ducale contained particularly interesting dungeons from which Casanova supposedly escaped. Over at La Scuola Grande di San Rocco, I studied works by Tintoretto, famous for his masterful use of light and engrossing compositions. My personal favorite was his "Last Supper", the painting's unconventional perspective of a receding table and the dark atmosphere imbuing the biblical scene with a human scale and sensibility.

At the Venice Biennale, the art fair conceived in 1893, I seemed to instantly revert to a child in a playground. At the Arsenale, hosting international artists, I clambered into a bird's nest to peek through a secret window and discover a woman's yellow suit; walked up an inclining walkway made of broken rubble; and smelled the many multicolored spices of Latin America lined in bowls across the floor.

There was a different story at night, when working Venetians retreated to the nearby Mestre, emptying the city's center. While making my way through the darkened squares and walkways on the way to dinner at the recommended Hosteria Barbarigo, I found myself shivering in the night mist and listening to the lapping water. The old-world buildings, so charming in daylight, now looked abandoned and haunted. I stared down the narrow streets that I hoped would take me in the correct direction, but only darkness awaited me. I could not help thinking about The Venetian Vespers, Death in Venice, and The Comfort of Strangers, all stories about Venetian visitors destroyed by the city's sinister forces.

FLORENCE. The B&B Monte Oliveto, south of the Arno, cost me just €76 per night and was my favorite inn. The owners were exceptionally hospitable, inviting me to a cocktail party with their family, and the entire experience helped revive my spirits and my rusty Italian.

I promptly made my way to Palazzo Pitti, the former home of the Tuscan grand dukes and the king of Italy. The walls of the Palazzo Pitti's Palatine Gallery were filled with the vibrant works of the so-called mannerists -- Andrea del Sarto, Rosso Fiorentino, Bronzino, and Jacopo da Pontormo -- and I had an epiphany, standing before "Assumption of the Virgin" by Andrea del Sarto, that the mannerists were, and have always been, my favorite artists. The Renaissance generally achieved a kind of perfection in naturalism; the mannerists, in contrast, falling between the high 16th-century Renaissance and the 17th-century Baroque periods, unconventionally used warping and exaggerated artistic techniques, making their paintings slightly bizarre and dreamlike.

The mannerist painting that absolutely stunned me was found unexpectedly in the Museo dell'Opera di Santa Croce. It was a Bronzino called "The Descent of Christ into Limbo", painted in 1552, with Christ standing at the center of a half-naked crowd ambling chaotically through Limbo. His body has strong muscle definition, and he exudes regal power. Some of the crowd is focused on him in devotion, while others are preoccupied with other pursuits -- naked children, or putti, erotically embrace in the foreground. The contorted demon in the upper left corner -- with his swinging, sagging breasts -- could have come right from a 20th-century surrealist painting. The scene's lack of focus and off-kilter chaos make the painting both emotionally powerful and disorienting.

ROME. Rome is a city to take your time in, to wander from museum to monument and enjoy the warm weather in a piazza, drinking endless espressos while mulling over the decision of where and what to eat next. I stayed at the charmless B&B Hotel Roma Trastevere, in an area of Rome across the Tiber from the historic city center, known mostly for good restaurants, a large flea market, and vibrant night life.

Every walk through Rome is in the footsteps of history, and one day, I walked to Piazza di Spagna, far on the other side of Rome. It took over an hour, as I ambled past the ancient ruins of Largo di Torre Argentina, the Pantheon, the Victor Emmanuel Monument, and the pearl string of chain stores leading to Piazza di Spagna. Forno in Campo de' Fiori sells pizza squares right out of the oven that cost only a couple of euros. Trieste's Mamma Angelina serves up authentic Roman cuisine. That's where I had rigatoni alla gricia, made with pecorino cheese, guanciale (cured pork jowls and cheeks), and black pepper.

My return flight was booked on the day of a transportation strike, and everywhere I heard Italians discussing the coming disruption. I ignored their bleak chatter and followed the crowds to the Vatican and St. Peter's Basilica, where the popular Pope Francis was drawing huge numbers of tourists.

Walking through the Vatican Museum to the Sistine Chapel was like trying to exit a miles-long subway during rush hour. But as I looked up at the spectacular Raphael fresco of "The Liberation of Saint Peter" -- with its glowing angel in pink freeing Saint Peter from a dank Roman prison -- I was reminded why it was worth battling the Vatican crowds.

In the Sistine Chapel, the shuffling migration came to an abrupt standstill as we all gazed up at "The Last Judgment", "The Life of Moses", and "The Life of Christ". The Vatican guards tried to shush the crowd while also telling attractive female tourists, "Very nice. Where you from?" I contorted my neck all the way back to look at Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam", the touchstone of his fresco cycle, essentially just two lines and a centimeter away from connecting -- but standing for the creation of all humanity.

Staring out at the clouds and sipping San Pellegrino on my flight home, I mused that my humanities curriculum at Johns Hopkins was made concrete at the Vatican and Notre-Dame, in the cities that had similarly inspired Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo, and Boccaccio. But what was truly priceless about this trip was my personal discovery of which works moved me -- without any external influences like studying or the usual compromises with travel buddies.

And, it must be said, the trip also pleased my parents. In the end, I returned triumphant like Henry James, having frugally spent just $8,563 of my all-inclusive $10,000 budget.